This invention relates to sailboards and, more particularly, to accessories which enable learners to more easily master the art of sailboard riding, i.e., windsurfing.
Sailboards are inherently difficult to ride and sail. Beginners may spend many hours mastering the arts of controlling and steering the sailboard. It can easily take forty hours, including teaching and practice, before the beginner can simply take a sailboard out and bring it back on flat water with a steady, gentle breeze.
The beginning windsurfer faces three major difficulties in learning to ride and sail a sailboard: (i) falling off the sailboard as it tips from side to side, (ii) dropping the sail, and again falling off, as the sail collects breezes or gusts, and (iii) learning to steer the sailboard without a rudder and with only a mobile sail attached to a mobile mast. Of the three difficulties, the first requires the least mental learning but the most physical learning. The third difficulty requires the most mental learning, but the least physical learning.
It has long been known that outriggers and floats can be used to provide stability to watercraft. Likewise, it has long been known that the use of guy-wires with a sail mast will help keep a mast upright. Although over twelve million people, world-wide, currently windsurf on occasion, and many more millions have tried, the present invention, to applicant's knowledge, is the first application to sailboards of any prior art technique which solves the problem of the mast falling into the water because the beginner lets go of the sail mast to avoid falling. Since this is, by far, any beginner's most serious problem in learning to windsurf, the present invention will have a high level of utility. In solving that problem, the present invention also solve's the beginner's other major problems: the sailboard's tendency to tip thus causing him to fall off, difficulty in holding the sail against the strength of the wind, learning to steer the sailboard, and the sailboard's excessive maneuverability.